Eionet
Eionet’s software tools
Networking improving Europe's environment
Bad habits 1: Headlines inside table
First observed bad habit is to put plain paragraphs inside a table and making the headlines not <h1>/<h1> but <font class="head1">Headline</font>. This:
<table width="400"> <tr height="10"><td colspan="2" width="400"></td></tr> <tr height="10"><td colspan="2" width="400"><font class="head00">Simple search</font></td></tr> <tr height="5"><td colspan="2" width="400"></td></tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" width="400"> enables you to quickly find ...
should be coded with no table at all:
<h1>Simple search</h1> <p> enables you to quickly find...
A defense for the practice
Netscape 4 ignored some of the CSS styling for HTML elements, and therefore designers tended to avoid <h1>, <h2> etc. and make their own structural meaningless headline tags to have full control over the look. Similarly, the <tr height="5"> tag was used to control the space between the headline and the paragraph. But these days are long gone, and we should not continue this practice.
The ironic part is that on the EIONET portal (www.eionet.europa.eu) these tricks were never used. It was and still is of higher priority to have HTML that is easy to write and easy to maintain. That there was a little to far between the headline and the paragraph after was something we lived with.
